Going Braless

In her seminal seventies feminist work, The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer declared that “bras are a ludicrous invention.” Whether you agree with her or not, there’s a backlash against bra-wearing right now that’s inspired a conversation across social media, and column inches in publications as diverse as The New Yorker and The Sun.

In true tabloid fashion, The Sun presented a naive dichotomy: is it better to be “comfortable or sexy” in lockdown, naturally peppering the feature with plenty of images of models in their underwear. Someone should have told them that in 2020 women can be both. Our definition of sexy has evolved far beyond the male-fantasy runways of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, and the crisis the former giant of the lingerie world finds itself in is proof. And in truth, if I had to choose one or the other, I’d choose to be comfortable while working. Sexy is unlikely to get the job done.

World War II freed women from wearing figure-moulding corsets, and it looks like the coronavirus pandemic will free women from wearing back-pinching underwire bras. When the metal used to make corsetry in the 1940s was needed for military supplies, women were let loose – literally and figuratively – working in factories for the first time and unrestricted by the waist-cinching, breast-boosting contraptions originally devised in the middle ages and made mandatory for middle- and upper-class women. Since lockdown pressed pause on the daily rituals we had little time to question pre-pandemic, women are reassessing everything, from the rationale of long office commutes to the pointlessness of wearing uncomfortable underwear.

When I saw a headline on the Vogue Australia website recently which read, “Have you gone braless in lockdown?” I immediately wondered, “Has anyone not gone braless in lockdown?!” When I worked in an office, the first thing I’d do on returning home from work was change into casual clothes and ditch my bra, because nothing signals the end of a working day quite like the unhooking of a bra strap; it’s better than that first sip of red wine on a Friday evening. Since lockdown began, I haven’t put on a bra more than a couple of times. It feels too restrictive when I’m at home, and pointless when the clothes I’m wearing over it are layered and fluid.

It’s amusing, though, that the notion of women ditching their bras during lockdown has generated such widespread debate. But then how women dress has always been mired in sexual politics, with women more often judged not on what they do, but on how they look while they’re doing it – even when they’re in the privacy of their own homes. How many of us feel the pressure to look good all of the time, and if we don’t, think we’re failing in some way? Writing for Man Repeller, Haley Nahman addressed this constant pressure women feel but insisted that, “You don’t have to look good. You do not owe anyone your most ‘attractive’ self if you’d rather just exist. You and your life are worth capturing, remembering and admiring regardless…”

Women have always been held to a higher sartorial standard than men because as The New York Times put it, “For some critics, a woman’s looks remain the first place they’ll go when they disagree with her opinions.” Hilary Clinton is a case in point. In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, how often was she lambasted not for her policies but for her choice of “Sergeant Pepper suits”, as they were described? In 2018, when Mary Lou McDonald became the leader of Sinn Féin, she was forced to reject suggestions in a newspaper article that her “sex appeal” was the reason she had gained the leadership position rather than her “effort, merit [and] ability”. Women in the public eye can’t do right for doing wrong. Look good and you’re criticised, look bad and you’re criticised. It’s the proverbial Catch 22.

In the past, not wearing a bra labelled you either an angry feminist (apparently bra-burning never actually happened in the sixties) or a hippie. Either way, you were an outsider, a provocative proposition, uncontained by dictated social norms, and you were judged harshly for it. Abandoning wearing a bra will always have feminist connotations, but for most women, it’s not a political decision, it’s about comfort, plain and simple. Maybe this is why, while many of us are ditching traditional underwire bras, there’s a renewed interest in bralettes; remember those pretty pullover cropped tops that transitioned our bodies from tweens to teens?

Last summer, the achingly cool Zoe Kravitz wore a Chantilly lace bralette to her wedding rehearsal dinner, while model Bella Hadid was photographed in a bralette with matching trousers. This is what modern sexiness looks like, with all its naturalness and ease. If the big breasts and bare bum cheeks of the Victoria’s Secret models were the definition of sexy in the 1990s, Marianne from Normal People is the 2020 version; from her underwear to her outerwear, there’s no uplift or cleavage, underwire or padding. She wears bohemian pieces in soft-fitting silhouettes that loosely hug and flatter her naturally petite frame.

A free spirit, Daisy Edgar-Jones’ character personifies what the bralette is beginning to represent for women tired of the restrictive nature of boulder-holders and boob cages. A bralette is freeing, and there’s an insouciance to wearing one that’s inherently attractive. If Instagram is anything to go by, bralettes are the new black. Unlike the tennis ball breasts once hoisted up as paragons of female sexuality by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham (who it’s rumoured had two breast reductions in 2009 and 2011), bralettes don’t try to reshape a woman’s breasts like the Wonderbra did in the 1990s to fit in with one media-prescribed version of how they should look, i.e full and pert. Bralettes instead adorn each woman’s natural size and shape.

Bralettes are really just the next phase in our never-ending athleisure love affair. Fancy joggers, elevated sweatshirts and white trainers have become modern classics rather than the seasonal flash-in-the-pan pieces many predicted. They’re easy to move in, smart and fresher looking than traditional tailoring. They’re also sexy in a relaxed, laidback way. They make skinny jeans look like a slow form of torture and heels one balancing act too many on an average working day. But it defeats the purpose of dressing this way if, beneath these soft, silhouette-flattering layers, there’s an underwire digging into your ribcage and straps chafing against your skin.

When Christian Dior launched his corseted and hip-padded New Look in 1947, only a couple of years after women had been freed from long hemlines and artificially small waists, there was outrage among many, and Coco Chanel mockingly remarked, “Dior doesn’t dress women, he upholsters them!” No woman wants to feel upholstered, and it turns out there’s little research to suggest that women with bigger breasts need the support of underwire bras. In fact, one study reportedly found more sagging occurred from wearing bras than from not.

It seems the lingerie world in all its guises is every woman’s sartorial oyster whatever her size and shape. I for one am going to start shopping bralettes. Worst-case scenario, I can wear them in bed. It’s a win-win.

Marie Kelly, July 2020.